487 quotes
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
The New Gods (1969)
Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?
The Book of Delusions (1936)
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
Tears and Saints (1937)
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.
A Short History of Decay (1949)